By Anthony Bogues
Anthony Bogues is a Professor of Humanities at Brown University. He is the author and editor of nine books, including The George Lamming Reader: The Aesthetics of Decolonization ( 2011 )
Last week George Lamming, one of the region’s most important novelists, writers and thinkers, celebrated his 94th birthday. Today Lamming resides in Barbados, frail in body, but his remarkable mind bursting with curiosity and often engaging in what he calls, “ruminations that think about the world” as well as critical exercises about the “work of the imagination.” He is, of course, along with Sylvia Wynter one of the last seminal Caribbean intellectuals whose work gave world presence to the Caribbean intellectual tradition. Today in the 21st century the writings and thought of Wynter, theorist, critic and playwright have become crucial in the academy and to the current moment in which the question of what it means to be human in the contemporary social world has been forcefully raised. The emergence of Lamming, Samuel Selvon, Frantz Fanon, Aime Cesaire, Jean Price Mars, Anton De Kom, CLR James, Derek Walcott, Maryse Conde, Kamau Brathwaite, Susan Cesaire, Wilfredo Lam amongst numerous others in the fields of literature, politics, history, art and critical thought generally represented a moment in the world history of thought and radical practices. These radical individuals worked against what Lamming described in a conversation last week, as “the universalism of Europe as the only teacher.” The Caribbean, the site where the modern European colonial encounter began with the Columbian voyage in the 15th century, produced in the 20th century a body of thinking and practices that shook that world and challenged its contours. Here one should not be surprised because it was within the Caribbean, in the 18th century, that the dual Haitian Revolution breached the European colonial world and its racial order. That revolution was not just a political and social one that ended racial slavery and created the first black republic in the Atlantic world, but it also reversed the order of knowledge about who was human and who was not, an order of classification integral to the human classification schemas created by European colonialism.
The remarkable body of thought and practices created in the 20th century by Caribbean individuals was part of worldwide radical anti- colonial and decolonization thinking and practice. An active element in this were the political and social struggles of African-Americans, as well as movements in India, Vietnam, Indochina and Africa. In these struggles, as CLR James once remarked, a new world took shape, one that was not dominated by European colonial powers. Yet here in the Caribbean as elsewhere in the formerly colonized world, the creation of newly independent states brought political independence but not necessarily freedom and sovereignty. Lamming and other radical anti- colonial thinkers were not so much preoccupied with the creation of new nation-states but rather with freedom and forms of decolonization. If we see his six novels, from In the Castle of My Skin (1956) to Natives of My Person (1971) as an elongated historical tale of the Anglophone Caribbean in which the fictional island of San Cristobal is a synecdoche, then some of Lamming’s core concerns are clear. Let us recall what the narrator in Season of Adventure (1960) says:
“But the main problem was language. It was language which caused the First Republic to fall. And the Second would suffer the same fate; the Second and the Third, unless they tried to find a language.”
This problem of language for Lamming was not about words but rather the capacity to name. He had already noted in 1956 in a talk at the seminal Black Writers Congress in Paris that, “language is intentional, and the intention seems clearly part of the human will to power. A name is an infinite source of control.“ If Europe was the teacher of universalism then there needed to be a kind of sovereignty, one in which the Caribbean would create its own language through making an inventory of self. To do this would require what David Scott noted in an interview with Lamming as the “sovereignty of the imagination.” As part of his commitment to create another kind of sovereignty, what he himself calls an area of “independent free choice, about the meanings you place on events”, Lamming attempted both to map as well as enact this kind of sovereignty. This can be seen in his editorship of New World Quarterly, particularly the 1966 Guyana Independence Issue, and the Barbados Independence Issue published in 1966/67, as well as the Enterprise of the Indies published in Trinidad and Tobago in 1999. Lamming’s leadership in creating and instigating a set of regional conferences in the 1980’s on culture and sovereignty, held in Cuba, Jamaica and Trinidad& Tobago is also testimony to this commitment.
In this current period of neo- liberal consensus within much of the Caribbean, this call of Lamming for a certain kind of sovereignty, one in which in the post-independence moment we can begin to do this inventory, is still a requirement. The immediate historical backdrop to Lamming’s novels is the period of the 1930’s, the workers’ strikes in the Caribbean, the formal emergence of nationalist movements in the region, the diasporic movement of writers and students to – and their return as well from – the metropole, as well as the struggles for constitutional independence. That historical moment has not only passed but within the aftermath of political independence the social settlements which undergirded that moment no longer exist. One of Lamming’s preoccupations has always been with the people “down below. “ Indeed, the problem with the Anglophone Caribbean nation states and many other Caribbean states has been the creation of societies in which the people “down below “are outside of the frame, remaining on the margins of these societies. Yet any forward movement in these societies requires foregrounding the lives and experiences of the people “down below.” Such a movement needs a new social and political settlement which is deeply democratic. For as Lamming noted in his eulogy to Walter Rodney, “the need for democracy is often a conscious and courageous effort to exorcise those twin demons of the tyrant which have pursued us from the past.”
Lamming has been called a “political novelist.” It is a nomenclature which he eschews. What is unmistakable is that as a writer he is concerned with politics – not with the narrow workings of political parties but with the ways in which a society can be organized in common association so that human beings might live within the frames of their creative capacity. For Lamming similar to Fanon (both were at the 1956 Black Writers Congress) there is this preoccupation with freedom. Fanon writes in Black Skin White Masks: “Yes to life. Yes, to Love. Yes, to generosity … No to the butchery of what is most human in man: freedom. “In the Season of Adventure, one of the main characters Powell says: “Take it from me, Crim, you can take it from me. If I ever give you freedom, Crim, then all your future is mine, ‘cause whatever you do in freedom name is what I make happen.”
The immediate past of our political independence, with a few notable exceptions, has been overdetermined by our colonial past. Ruptures from that past remain the unfinished part of decolonization. Throughout the region this past week there was warm acknowledgment of Lamming and his vast contributions to Caribbean literature, thought and culture. But as we acknowledge this remarkable Caribbean figure, we might do well to recall that his novels were sites of ideas, and that these ideas were about freedom, a kind of living in which the people “down below “would fashion our futures.
In many ways Lamming remains for us a touchstone, one whose work shapes the concerns of the Caribbean intellectual tradition. He continues to be a drum that guards the day.
